in so much space
by BookkeeperThe
Summary: . . . or, Shawn Spencer and his Adventures in Brainweird Land. (Or, Shawn is schizotypal, but good luck getting him to admit that.)


**Notes: timing is intentionally vague, but the last section takes place after the finale, so, spoilers. ** **Title comes from the Gnarls Barkley song 'Crazy.' Enjoy, and tell me what you think!**

**Warnings: delusions, unreality, possibly disassociation, Lassie being less that sensitive, ableist slurs. **

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"So what's this weirdo's damage?"

Shawn listened to Lassie's grumpy growl with half an ear, most of his attention on the young woman on the other side of the two-way mirror. Her eyes were fixed on the glass as if she could see them, her black fingernails tap-tap-tapping against the metal table. She was scared, and angry, but not because she was guilty. She either really didn't like cops, or she really didn't like mirrors. Or both.

"Dr. Evans was treating her for something called schizotypal personality disorder," Jules said, consulting her notes.

"It's a Cluster A personality disorder," Gus explained, in that tone he used that made it sound like he was just reminding everyone of something any reasonable person would already know. "It's primarily characterized by mild delusions, magical thinking, and difficulty forming strong interpersonal relationships."

"So she's nuts," Lassie surmised. "Perfect. Give me ten minutes, she'll be in a padded cell for the rest of her miserable life."

"Actually, the mentally ill are statistically less likely to commit –" Gus began, but Lassie was already in the interrogation room, slamming the door and making the woman jump.

"Let me make this very clear," Lassie said harshly, his voice slightly distorted by the microphone. He sounded like a cyborg, Shawn thought, and contemplated the possibility that Lassiter had been a robot all along for a moment before dragging his attention back to the situation at hand. "You either tell me how, where, and why you did it, and you spend the rest of your miserable life in a padded cell, or you don't, and you spend the rest of your life in a state penitentiary. Got it?"

The woman glared.

"I didn't. Do. Anything. I hated the bastard, alright? He was a piece of shit, like most psychiatrists. But I don't have the time, the energy, or the resources to kill every piece of shit I meet."

"She's telling the truth," Shawn stated abruptly. Jules shot him a curious look, but he didn't have time to explain. Lassie was still talking.

"Then I assume you can explain your whereabouts on Thursday night? Say around eight pm?"

Something like panic flickered across the woman's face.

"I – Thursday? Weekdays are hard, they kind of – they kind of blur –"

"I've got this," said Shawn, and he was slipping through the door before Juliet could finish her half-hearted protest.

"Spencer –" Lassie started threateningly, but Shawn ignored him, studying the woman, evaluating.

She was right; weekdays were hard. Time tended to run together, to skip and jump like a bad record. There were ways to keep track. Shawn used TV schedules, and Gus, and his memory. What did she use?

Black nail polish, defensive posture. She hated Dr. Evans, hated Lassie, hated most people she met. Hated authority and the system and society. Probably didn't watch TV at all, or if she did she picked and chose it on shady streaming sites online. No schedule. If she had a Gus they were probably as disoriented as she was most of the time. She was sharp, but having the sort of training and memory that Shawn did would have been too weird of a coincidence. Speech patterns said she was a writer.

Ah. There it was.

"It was a full moon on Thursday," Shawn told her. "It rained that day but it cleared up by nighttime."

"Petrichor," the woman said, as if in agreement, and Shawn resisted the urge to tell her to stop making up words. "I remember. I was at the library all evening. I walked home when it closed at nine. You can ask the librarian, she'll remember."

Lassie shot Shawn a glare, and he grinned.

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Shawn's not crazy.

So, alright, he doesn't quite think like other people do. And yeah, okay, that's not entirely his dad's fault. And sure, sometimes he believes things that don't exactly synch with reality. But if he knows that they're not real, they're not delusions, right?

Right.

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"Shawn, did you rearrange my DVDs again?" Gus demanded with an entirely unwarranted level of irritation as he stormed into the Psych office.

"Better question: why do you even have DVDs?" Shawn called back, by which he meant, 'yes, of course I did; it seemed important at the time,' but also, 'why do you even have DVDs?' "It's a digital world out there. Convert."

"DVDs are digital, Shawn. It stand for _digital versatile disk_, or, in some usages, _digital video disk. _And you need to stop messing with my stuff. You know your so-called organizational systems only make sense to you."

Gus sounded annoyed, but his eyes lingered on Shawn for longer than strictly necessary, so Shawn knew that he meant 'you cool now?' (but also, 'you need to stop messing with my stuff').

"Whatever, dude," Shawn said, by which he meant 'it's cool, it's cool, I'm cool,' which was kind of impressive, lying in a double-meaning.

. . . Or maybe not that impressive, seeing as Gus totally was not buying it. The fact that Shawn was currently sitting on the floor, leg jiggling against the table and hand tapping against his leg, was probably not helping his case.

Gus held out his hand. Shawn took it. Together, they pulled him back onto his feet.

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Shawn's not crazy, no matter how often he acts like he is.

He knows it's not real; the vampires and the ghosts and the curses; the magic and the visions and the auras. But all the cold, hard facts in the world can't shake the boiling, bone-deep belief, so he just goes with it. Let Jules think he's joking; let Lassie think he's lying. He is.

Mostly.

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In retrospect, the camping trip was probably a bad idea.

It seemed romantic at the time, a good way to get away from bustling San Francisco and absorb some of the recent developments, a cute little pre-wedding honeymoon type thing. A honeysun? He'd have to work on that one.

But the thing was, there was no reception out here. And no other campers as far as the eye could see. And definitely no streetlights. No lights of any kind, really. And it was starting to get dark. And Shawn's life was a narrative, always had been, he knew it in his heart and his soul and his gut, even if he knew in his mind that was pretty irrational, so when Jules leaned against him and said,

"The sunset is beautiful. I'm glad we did this."

– well, he couldn't help remembering the end of every opening sequence to every horror movie just about ever, right before everything went to hell in a hand basket.

After the third time Shawn asked her if she had heard that too, Jules started to look annoyed.

After the fifth, she started to look concerned.

It wasn't until after he stopped asking, but couldn't quite stop jumping at probably-not-exactly-real sounds and suggesting with increasingly badly hidden desperation that they retire to the tent and turn on every light they had brought, that she sat him down across from her and forced him to meet her eyes.

"Shawn." She turned on another flashlight, and took his hand. He could feel his pulse racing against her fingers, and willed it to slow down. "Shawn, I don't know if there's a good way to ask this – and please don't take this the wrong way – are you – I mean, have you ever been –"

"No," he said. "Not diagnosed."

And she was staring at him with wide eyes, and he could see her mind working, because she wasn't the twisted, albeit brilliant mess of hyper-observation that his father had molded him into, but she was still a detective, and she knew him. She knew that 'not diagnosed' didn't mean 'not sick.' He had always been a good liar.

"This isn't new, is it," she said, and it wasn't a question.

"That depends entirely on your frame of reference."

She shook her head, smiling a little despite herself. He counted that as a win.

"Does Gus know?"

"Jules, come on. Gus has figured something was off in my noggin since he learned how to pronounce words that start with about fifty consonants in a row."

"Y can be a vowel, Shawn."

"I've heard it both ways."

Jules glanced away, all amusement fading from her face, and Shawn sighed.

"It's really not a big deal. I mean, it's not always _fun_, but it's fine. I deal. Gus helps. You help. My dad – mostly disapproves from a distance, so that's the same as ever. You said it yourself, none of this is new."

"Yeah, I know," Juliet said, chewing on her lip. "I guess I've known for a while, now. It's just – Shawn, did you sometimes think you _were_ psychic?"

Shawn hadn't been expecting that, though, of course, he really, really should have. _Yes, _he wanted to say. _Yes, that's it exactly. I broke your heart and mine because I'm sick, because I was confused; not because I'm a dishonest douchebag who's too lazy to figure out how to relate to people except through lying. _But he'd been trying to be better. To her, at least.

"No," he said, and tried and failed not to see the renewed flare of disappointment in her eyes. "I mean, sometimes, kind of – but it was more of, like – a really vivid daydream. I knew it wasn't real. I mostly do, y'know. I'm not exactly _A Beautiful Mind_, here. A Ruggedly Handsome Mind, maybe. An Excellent Coifed Mind, definitely. But it's not – I mean, I'm not –"

Juliet didn't say, "I know," and she didn't say "of course you're not," because she was getting pretty good at telling when he was lying, even to himself. She just said,

"It's okay, Shawn," and touched his cheek with a strong, warm hand, and kissed him gently, and repeated, "It's okay."

And there were still whispers at the back of his mind, and shadows at the corners of his eyes, and his life would always be a narrative, but she was warm and steady and _here, right here_, and he wasn't okay but it was okay, it was okay, it was okay.


End file.
